42 A RE-POR TE-R AT LARGE- T \VO and a half years ago the Lieutenant was 111inding his own placid business. He was twenty- nine and lived with his wife in a pleas- ant house In \Vestchester. A Inember of what one of his friends has descrihed as "an old Yale family which hasn't had a thief in it for three generations," he had been out of Yale eight years and was holding down a responsihle technical job in a manufacturing com- pany in which his family had a large interest. He was, however, able to de- vote a certain amount of gentlenlanlv attention to art and the theatre and some serious, expert attention to the collecting of rare hooks. Late in 1940 the Navy, scouting around for men with his kind of technical experience, offered him a job as an assistant hull superintendent in a Navy yard, together with a C0111- mission as a Reserve officer. These he happily accepted. \Vhen we entered the war, he applied for sea duty, closed his country house, put his wife in a small apart111ent on East Sixty-sixth Street, and went to Evanston, Illinois, to take a training course at Northwestern U ni- versity . Not long afterward he was as- signed to the U .S.S. Wasp, the aircraft carrier, which was then on duty in the far Pacific, and he was aboard her when she was sunk last summer by the J aps off the Solomons. One recent afternoon I Inet the Lieutenant in the men's bar of the Ritz. He is a tall, neat, wan, slightly bald 111an who shows two effects of the shock he suffered in the disaster: his right hand tre111bles rhythmically and he limps a little, favoring his right leg. \:yr e sat down at a table under a row of flags of the U nited Nations and ordered "- beer. "Now, let's get one thing cleared up right away," he said before I'd had a chance to say 1110re than an idle word or two. "I'm no hero. Everybody says he's no hero. But the fact of the 111atter is I am no hero. I came out of the sink- ing unscathed. This 111inor shock I have is going away. There was heroism on that ship, some exceptional heroism, and there was no funking by any officer or any man, but you don't get medals for being socked, and that's what we were -socked." He put his glass down and grasped his right hand with his left to keep it from trembling. "The way the men on the \Vasp acted was rugged," he went on. "I know of no better word for it. F or- get 'gallant.' Rugged is what it really was. You may think the word is pre- cious, but it's the word Navy 111en use. 50CKéD A good time to use it is when you're talking ahout the ,,V asp." T HE Inen who sailed the \Vasp took a lot of pride in her. They called her the Stinger, usually referring to her as the old Stinger, though she was a fairly new ship, commissioned in 1940. She got the name Stinger when, last spring, \\Tinston Churchill sent a 111es- sage to her captain asking rhetorically, "Who said a \Vasp only stings once?" This 111essage was sent after the \Vasp had delivered a shipload of British planes through some of the most dangerous waters in the world to the island of Malta, which was then being bombed several times a day by the Nazis. One day a squadron of heavy German bomb- ers was flying over Malta, pushing al- 1110St unhindered through the island's dwindling defenses, when suddenly fifty or so fighter planes came apparently out of nowhere and pounced on the Ger- 111ans. ..c\.ctually, the planes were fronl the \Vasp, and they knocked off the bOInhers as an incidental to Inaking a hop fronl the ship to the island's airfields. The ,,V asp's achievelnent in relieving Malta, the way she could take green water clear over her flight deck and past her hridge in stormy weather on Atlantic patrol, and the 111ysterious 111an- ner in which she turned up in the South Pacific when she was widely helieved to he in the Atlantic gave her a peculiar reputation for seaworthiness, daring, and power. By last summer the 111en of the '\1 asp felt that she had used up her time. As the Lieutenant said to Ine, "She was in a race with destiny." He said this with feeling. It is a naval axiom that any navy can sink an enemy carrier at will if it cares to pay the price. Among ships of the Navy the life expectancy of a carrier is particularly meagre. The approved technique of sinking one is to hlast her defenses awry with dive- bombers and then get her with torpedo - QiJ> \ ) 'jt... f ? , " , .\ J , ......# ",,,, ,,,,, ---- -2P cÁ(}ì't .DOJ-f ((Thanks a lot) old fellow) and here's s011 ething- for you ."